


if i could catapult my heart / to where you are

by amaelamin



Series: touch requests [4]
Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Drift Compatibility, Falling In Love, M/M, Not Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018) Compliant, it is dead to me, the second movie does not exist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:20:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23702239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amaelamin/pseuds/amaelamin
Summary: 'touch' request fill 4!-> JOHNIL + johnny hates people being touchy with him but he finds himself wanting taeil’s touch more and more often
Relationships: Moon Taeil/Suh Youngho | Johnny
Series: touch requests [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1695640
Comments: 31
Kudos: 171





	if i could catapult my heart / to where you are

**Author's Note:**

> SO. i have been planning a pacific rim fic for about 4 years now and finally it is taking shape. take this as a prologue of sorts, or a prequel, or a peek into the world of this story. title is from 'catapult' by jack savoretti which inspired this entire au.  
> \- DC: drift compatible  
> \- credit for the name of johnil’s jaeger is owed in part to the genius sarah ♥️

“Come on, man.” Johnny heaves Yuta off of him, and Yuta scowls from where he’s crammed back between Johnny and Doyoung on Doyoung’s lower bunk bed. 

It’s weird, Johnny thinks, how everything that goes on inside your head is so much more dramatic and self-important than the reality that’s happening outside. He stops Yuta from octopus-ing all over him because, one - he really, really isn’t a touchy-feely person, and two - Taeil’s sitting right there on the floor in front of them. Just there. Casually watching them, and Johnny’s brain whispers _don’t let him get the wrong idea_ as if Taeil would even care if Yuta got up and sat down right in Johnny’s lap. 

“We might become pilots together,” Yuta whines, and their maknae, Jaehyun, discreetly takes away Yuta’s half-finished can of beer. Fourth can? Fifth? “What if we end up DC?”

“I think we can be DC without you being all over me,” Johnny drawls, and he’s proud that it comes out sounding normal. Nonchalant, even, as he tries not to look at Taeil to see if Taeil was paying attention. “It’s first and foremost a _cognitive_ connection, Nakamoto. Haven’t you been paying attention in class?”

“Call me Yuta,” Yuta pouts. “You don’t see me calling you ‘Seo’. We should try our best to get along.”

“I’ve known you all for a month only so far and I’m already tired of you,” Doyoung declares from his corner. “I’m not sure I can tolerate another eleven months of training.”

Taeil laughs, and Johnny doesn’t look away fast enough before Taeil catches him looking. And then he _does_ abruptly tear his gaze away which makes it clear that he was embarrassed to be caught, and - Johnny sighs to himself as his brain starts to panic. 

“Well,” Johnny gets up, self-conscious to hell and back. _Is he looking at me?_ “It’s getting late. Think I’m gonna head back to B dorm.”

Taeyong hums in agreement, which is the unofficial signal for all of them to break it up for the night. It’s not apparent to Johnny when Taeyong became the leader of their little group, and sometimes Johnny thinks Taeyong hasn’t really realised it himself either. Taeyong picks himself up and then looks at their mess of empty beer cans. “I’ll help clean this up, Doyoung.”

“Thanks, hyung,” Doyoung looks up in gratitude, before recovering himself and snagging Jaehyun by the collar. “You help too.” 

Johnny hauls Yuta off the bed by one sticky hand and then hesitates when Taeil holds out his arms too, waiting to be helped up from his position on the floor. 

Taeil’s hand is like any other hand. Maybe a bit smaller than most other hands. A normal hand, nonetheless. Johnny digs his nails into his tingling palms once Taeil is on his feet and lets go, looking for his shoes at the door. 

“You coming?”

Johnny turns, painfully aware of Taeil waiting for him. Painfully aware of Taeil. 

“What about Taeyong?”

“He’ll come when he’s done. Let’s go, Johnny.”

Johnny goes, still feeling like little fireworks are going off in his hands.

*

Johnny would like to be drift-compatible with Taeil, but he knows it’s not possible because most of the time he doesn’t even understand what goes through Taeil’s head.

Taeil and Yuta become fast friends and Yuta, from Johnny’s perspective, is even less comprehensible than Taeil.

“My guess is that they’ll be DC,” Jaehyun observes, standing with Johnny amongst the rest of the trainees watching Yuta and Taeil’s sparring. “When you think about it they’re strangely similar.”

Johnny grunts. He doesn’t like it, but it doesn’t make it less probable. He thinks Jaehyun is right. 

“Then Doyoung with Taeyong, I guess, since they’ve known each other since they were in diapers, apparently. Me and you? Actually-”

Johnny nods slowly, tuning him out. He’d gravitated to Jaehyun, the only other English-speaker in their little circle because of the short time he’d spent in America. Jaehyun is almost the opposite of Johnny in every way, Johnny thinks. Most of his life in Korea, short time in America, calm and assured. Johnny had spent most of his life in America, only having come to Korea a few years ago, and was most definitely not calm and assured.

Taeil and Yuta step out of the sacred circle in the dojo, sweaty and panting. Smiling at each other. 

Johnny claps Taeil on the shoulder and feels the frisson in his fingers he’s starting to get used to now every time he touches Taeil. He’s stopped questioning it - he’s kind of afraid to know why it happens at this point.

“Good job, hyung,” he says, and Taeil turns the smile Johnny would die for on him. 

*

“If we were DC,” Johnny starts, mouth running away with him, “What would our jaeger be called?”

“You think they’d give us our own jaeger?” Taeil frowns at the mockup pilot’s console in front of him. “Wait, do you press this one before or after we begin the drift sequence?”

“After,” Johnny reminds him patiently. Taeil forgets this part every time, and Johnny wonders if he wasn’t so infatuated he would find it as endearing as he does. 

“It doesn’t make sense to have graduated pilots and not let them fight,” Johnny reasons. “Right now this base only has two active jaegers, anyway. Another one or two would come in useful, if HQ allows it.”

“If they can build one fast enough,” Taeil points out. “But last time they had a pilot training programme was already five years ago, so… it’s possible.”

“Maybe the Na brothers want to retire,” Johnny raises an eyebrow at Taeil. “They’ve been doing this a long time. Then we could have their jaeger.”

“You’re very sure both of us are going to make it,” Taeil murmured, punching in the rest of his initialisation sequence. 

“Of course we are,” Johnny says, and then is belatedly struck by what Taeil said. It had never occurred to him that he may not make it through the programme - or that Taeil wouldn’t. 

As if seeing it on his face, Taeil gives in. “What’s that English song you were listening to the other day? In the dorms. You and Jaehyun were yelling it.”

“What, _Total Eclipse of the Heart_?” Johnny asks, startled, and sings a little of it. “That one?”

“Yeah. Our jaeger’s name - Eclipse. I like it.”

Johnny sucks in a breath. “Eclipse. Why?”

“You’re so big sometimes when I stand behind you nobody can see me.”

“That’s not-” Johnny laughs in delight, utterly taken by surprise. “That’s not true, you’re not that small-”

But Taeil is laughing at him - with him - and nothing else matters. 

“Eclipse then. Sure.”

*

Doyoung is the one who puts words to what the trainees are all thinking. 

“We’ll be okay. When it’s our turn. We’ll be okay.”

Operations techs relay instructions and statistics as the whole base stands tense behind their Marshal, who stands in front of the bridge and the huge screens that show the position of the jaeger Autumn Apple and the kaiju it’s been sent to fight. 

Johnny looks sideways at Taeil next to him, the lights of the screens reflecting on his face, and thinks of a future he doesn’t dare to hope for. Someone jostles through the crowd to the bridge, and several people bump up against Johnny - flinching away, Johnny instead accidentally presses up against Taeil’s arm. 

Twinkling little stars run up his skin and into his brain, into his eyes, when Taeil turns to him. 

“Do you feel that?” Taeil whispers. “It happens a lot. Static, when we touch.”

Johnny cannot breathe, so he settles for nodding his head. 

“Weird.”

Johnny cannot think about anything else the rest of the time while Autumn Apple fights the category Four kaiju and wins easily to raucous cheers, the mother-daughter duo proving once again the base’s best. All Johnny wants to do is hold Taeil’s hand.

He doesn’t.

*

Johnny thinks. 

He thinks of how sometimes in the dead of night he wakes up to hear Taeyong and Doyoung whispering together in the bunk below his, even though Doyoung sleeps in dorm A. He thinks of how Doyoung always leaves an hour before morning call. He thinks of Taeil sleeping in the next double-decker bed behind him, also on the top bunk, with all that empty air between them. 

Taeil said he feels the tingles too, and to Johnny’s tired brain it’s a simple equation. 

Solve for x, Johnny thinks. Solve for x. 

*

They’re put through a hundred drift compatibility tests. Sparring, problem-solving, trust-building tests. The one that makes Johnny panic, though, is the one hardly anyone else takes seriously. 

“Swing dance? Is this a joke?”

Johnny looks at Jaehyun, who shrugs and grins. “Kinda makes sense, actually.”

Johnny is too _tall_. He has too much limb everywhere. _Dancing and touching and me do not go together_ , he wants to scream, and from the first uncomfortable moment Jaehyun puts his arm around Johnny’s back Johnny cannot wait for it to end. He manages to not stomp all over Jaehyun’s feet, though, which he considers a vast victory.

After an hour they switch partners, and Johnny wants to die. 

He’s the tallest. Taeil’s the _shortest_ , shorter than Johnny by almost twenty centimetres. He can see people around them trying to hide their smiles at the picture they make, but Johnny thinks in desperation with the last part of his logical brain that at least Taeil will be easier to lift than Jaehyun for the fancier moves. 

He resolutely pushes aside every thought he’s ever had about how Taeil is the perfect height for him to give forehead kisses to, or hold on his lap, or curl around at night. 

Taeil looks up at him, and Johnny quickly thinks up something to say to make him laugh. It works, and Johnny misses a step. Taeil laughs more.

He sees the goosebumps raise on Taeil’s skin the longer they stay touching each other, even as they both huff and puff their way through the routine. He forces himself to focus with deadly concentration even as all he wants to do is savour the feel of Taeil under his hands. Fireworks, fireworks, fireworks. 

Taeil is blushing by the end, and Johnny cannot look away. 

*

It is not, as Johnny had previously been so convinced, a purely cognitive connection. 

He finds this out the first time he runs a simulation drift with Jaehyun, and then Doyoung, Yuta, Taeyong, and finally Taeil. Him and Taeyong couldn’t even get their VR jaeger to move. Him and Doyoung, like him and Yuta, had better luck - managed to get out of the loading dock but completely went to pieces when they had to face a kaiju simulation. Him and Jaehyun made mistakes but managed at last to kill the kaiju. 

Johnny’s terrified of his turn with Taeil, and wipes his sweating hands on his jumpsuit when tech initiates the drift sequence. 

Not only do they get out of the loading dock, they kill the kaiju in record time.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Jaehyun hollers at them once they come out of the simulation pod. “Nobody’s done it that fast before!”

“How did you do that?” Yuta demands. Johnny looks at Taeil, who is staring steadily back at him. 

_I thought that if that kaiju was real I’d have to make sure Taeil doesn’t get hurt._

“I don’t know,” Johnny shrugs. “It just happened. Lucky, I guess.”

“Yeah. Lucky.” Taeil echoes.

*

 _How does one do this?_ Johnny thinks desperately, with the official letter in his hand. Taeil sits facing him, his own letter held loosely in his lap and chewing nervously on his bottom lip. Johnny almost automatically starts to tell him to stop because it’s a terrible habit that Taeil needs to kick, but the words die in his throat at the realisation of how tense Taeil is.

“So - yay?” Johnny tries weakly, and Taeil’s eyes dart to his face. “This means we’re more than halfway to graduating, at least. And neither of us are failing any classes, or tests, so it’s a good thing, right? This is good. I mean, I think it’s good, though kind of unexpected, I don’t know if the others-”

“Johnny.”

Johnny stops talking.

Taeil slowly reaches over and takes his hand, intertwining their fingers, and the fireworks come out to play. 

“Eclipse, right?” he asks softly.

“Yeah,” Johnny whispers, heart pounding so hard he can’t think straight through the noise. _Drift compatible._ Johnny looks at Taeil, and then looks at their hands. _Kaiju-fighting soulmates_. More than just kaiju-fighting soulmates?

“I’m going to protect you,” Johnny blurts out, Taeil snorting at him in response. “I mean it. I’ll never let you get hurt.”

“We protect _each other_ , Johnny,” Taeil tells him. “That’s what this means.”

If possible, the sparks in Johnny’s skin intensify, and Taeil gasps a little, staring at their joined hands. 

“Our bodies knew before we did,” Taeil says, and it’s the last thing Johnny is expecting him to say. Johnny chokes on an inhale, wheezing gently. 

“Is it just our hands?” Taeil continues to muse, and Johnny needs to tap out of this conversation right the fuck now before he actually collapses. “If we touched anywhere else would it be the same?”

“Kiss me and find out?” Johnny croaks with his dying breath. His last wish, as it were, before he crosses to the other side.

Taeil laughs, bright and beautiful. “Maybe when we kill our first kaiju for real. How easy do you think I am?”

*

“ _Initiating total disengage, stand by._ ”

“ _Desequencing drift in 5. 4. 3. 2. 1. Drift desequencing complete. Sync offline_.”

“ _Stand by for spinal apparatus and foot stables disengage_.”

“This is Alpha Two to Eclipse. Good job, boys! Popped your kaiju cherry nicely. Please come right back in for your first debrief with the Marshal.”

Johnny is practically vibrating, adrenaline spiraling off his skin in crazy waves. He needs to get out of this suit. He needs to eat five fucking double cheeseburgers. He needs to-

Taeil barrels into him once he’s free of the devices locking him into the jaeger command post, arms flung around Johnny’s neck. Johnny grabs him instinctively, feeling Taeil’s ecstatic laugh against his lips and in his heart before Taeil kisses him hard. 

The fireworks, Johnny finds out in the sweetest way, are absolutely not just limited to their hands. 

*

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for this request <3 
> 
> [twt](https://twitter.com/haetsalmoonbit) / [cc](https://t.co/wABa3kxW2p?amp=1)


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